Stickybits: an alternative to `position: sticky` polyfills

Stickybits is a small JavaScript utility plugin. It’s goal is not to get in the way. It does one thing well: help with sticky elements. It is not dependent on other JavaScript Plugins, can be imported via npm, and approaches sticky elements in a very utility-oriented way.

Solving the sticky element problem can lead to sticky situations

When navigating sites, it is common to see HTML elements, like banners and navigations, sticking to the top and bottom of the browser. There are a couple of ways that can be done.

One, there is position: sticky, a native CSS feature. You might use it something like this:

header {
  position: sticky;
  top: -1px;
}

MDN explains it well:

Sticky positioning is a hybrid of relative and fixed positioning. The element is treated as relative positioned until it crosses a specified threshold, at which point it is treated as fixed positioned.

Two, you can essentially fake that behavior with JavaScript. You measure scroll positions and flip-flop the element between position: relative (or static or anything else) and position: fixed as needed.

I’d say that neither of these techniques are quite ideal.

By doing the flip-flopping yourself, there may be jumpiness when these elements go from fixed position to not. This issues is worsened in mobile device browsers.

With native CSS alone, you don’t have the ability to know when the element is in one state or the other.

Get the best of both worlds with StickyBits

Stickybits a lightweight (~2KB) alternative to position: sticky polyfills. It is an easy to set up plugin that is cross-compatible with any other plugins, libraries, or frameworks.

Installation with npm:

npm i stickybits --save-dev

Or, installation with Yarn:

yarn add stickybits --dev

Usage:

stickybits('[your-sticky-selector]');

With the out-of-the-box solution above, you now have set any element with your selector to be sticky. This will work for browsers that support .classList whether position: sticky is supported or not.

Stickybits, with the additional useStickyClasses: true property set will add sticky and stuck classes when elements become sticky or stuck. This makes it easy to hook up CSS styles based on when the selected element become static, sticky or stuck. This useful utility was added after Dave Rupert mentioned it on the Shop Talk Show Podcast.

Stickybits also supplies offset properties and a clean-up method hook to help better manage its sticky state.

Demos

See the Pen Njwpep by Jeff Wainwright (@yowainwright) on CodePen.

See the Pen CSS `position: sticky` example by Jeff Wainwright (@yowainwright) on CodePen.

More demos provided on GitHub.

Conclusion

Stickybits is a JavaScript Plugin for making an HTML element stick to the top or bottom of a browser window within its parent. With the varying implementations of position: fixed; and position: sticky; across browsers, making high quality sticky features is challenging. Stickybits solves this.

Stickybits was inspired by FixedSticky from Fillament Group, who has recently deprecated their plugin.

It is open-sourced by Dollar Shave Club and maintained by our team and I.

Stickybits: an alternative to `position: sticky` polyfills is a post from CSS-Tricks

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